On the media

I spent the better part of my Sunday down in the DC area, catching up with my old college buddy Micah (who rocks, in case you weren't already aware). As you might imagine, in the course of catching up, joking, reminiscing, and any other number of things that happen when old friends get together, two blogging, thinking types like us turned our attention to some serious topics as well.

One of the topics we hit on briefly was the media. Like many people, I am fairly critical of the mainstream media for a variety of reasons. If you've read much of this blog, you know that even the sports media doesn't escape my ire. In fact, since, as an aspiring sportswriter, I get more exposure to the sports media than the regular news media, I probably am harder on the sports media, because I know it better these days. One of the things I really find beneficial about that is that I believe it brings more balance to my understanding and critique of the news media.

"Why would you believe that?", you might ask. And even if you aren't asking that, I'm going to tell you. The sports media operates within the same framework, rules, and scope as the news media. However, there are no ideologies in sports, at least when it comes to straight up reporting. Obviously there are time when sports collide with issues of race, crime, gender and the like, and certainly reporting on these kind of stories can be open to ideological influence. However, for the most part, ideology is irrelevant in sports coverage.

What does all of that mean? Well, most of the time, critiques of the mainstream news media center around bias, and ultimately go to suggesting that one outlet or the other (or even the entire industry) has a specific ideological agenda that actively tilts their presentation of the facts. Were ideological bias and agendas truly the primary source of the kind of poor reporting we often see in the news media, one would expect the sports media to be largely devoid of that sort of thing. However, that's just not the case. I've cited several examples of reporting in the sports media that is every bit as misleading and "biased" as you find in the news media, in just the few weeks that I've had this blog up and running again. And it's not like those are the only ones. I just don't have the time or the energy to chase them all down.

This discovery has confirmed in my mind what I was already leaning towards believing - that the mainstream media, as a for profit venture, only has one true alligience, and that is profit itself. That's not to say that certain news outlets don't have a clear ideological slant in one direction or the other. However, it's my belief that they are only beholden to that slant to the extent that it draws viewers, sells papers, etc. Reporting these days is often characterized by a dangerous combination of zeal and laziness: zeal in finding a story and getting it out their, laziness in a lack of effort to get the story right the first time. The whole story is often not as exciting as one particular half of it is.